It’s 38 degrees in the shade and I’m sitting in the Daly Waters caravan park, about 400km south of Darwin and a whole lot of kilometres north of Uluru. The blog has been down for almost a week now because I missed a “your payment didn’t work email” for my domain name. I’d wanted to update the blog almost a week ago while things were fresh in my mind, but alas, it’s still not up, so I’m typing this onto the computer in the hope that it will be back up in the next day or two, so when I get some reception again I’ll be able to post.
I’ve done some driving in the last week or two, I’m sitting at Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory and it’s about 36 in the shade. Strange to think that only a couple of weeks back I was suffering from the cold back in Tingha, in fact I still have the little fan heater out in the back of the troopy, figure I could pack it away now as nights rarely get to 10 or less. The picture above was somewhere in Northern Queensland just before dawn, the sky was the bluest blue I’ve seen in a long time.
It’s been a long hiatus between posts and much has happened since my last post. After leaving Tassie and returning to my van in Learmonth near Ballarat I sold my Landcruiser 200 series and prepared the Troopy for an adventure – the big lap of Australia in the troopy. Well at least that was the plan, however, things don’t always turn out how you plan them and I’m not sure whether I’ll make it around as I’m moving too slowly yet again.
The western areas of Tasmania are quite stunning, much of the west in inaccessible and those areas which do have roads are magnificent. At this stage I’d become a bit of a walking machine and I was trekking longer and higher wherever possible. The further I was pushing it the further I wanted to keep pushing it.
Yeah sorry, another car picture. I pulled into a caravan park which seemed very full and I was about to turn around and leave till I saw another troopy parked by the water so figured I’d stay for a night. They had bought there’s many years ago as an x-camper and changed almost nothing on the vehicle, it was the old straight 6 with no turbo, only 2 years older than mine. I’d arrived back in Tassie at about 5 in the morning, it was dark and foggy and I’d had very little sleep laying down on a couch in the ferry.
I’d been thinking about converting my landcruiser 200 series into something more useful for quite a while, ever since I was back in Fowlers bay I’d been keeping an eye out online and researching a few different options. Originally my thoughts were to go for a tray back ute with a slide on camper, but there were a few drawback to that, mainly that there was no real living space during bad weather in a slide on. So, the troopy conversion won out for my wants and needs in the end.
There’s a lot to see around the Hobart area, when I first drove through the city I was just happy to get out the other side but now that I’ve spent some time here it’s growing on me, perhaps a little like a fungus. I wouldn’t want to live here, but as a major centre near by that you may need to visit, there’s everything you could need and more. Also for a capital city, it hasn’t lost it’s small scale artisan aspect, bottle shops sell local ciders and beers, IGA sells local small goods and cheeses.
Why is it that posts are coming through thick and fast down here in Tassie where I’ve had no power and very limited internet connection and facilities? I guess it’s because I feel more like I’m on an adventure here, a holiday of sorts. I have a mission and I’m doing it rather than just living in my caravan wherever I happen to be and I want to record it and keep track. This is my office of sorts where I’ve made all the Tassie posts from, I’ve spent many hours sitting on those hard metal stools wading though all the photos and trying to remember what I did a week or two ago.
Lovely bit of dry stone wall… Huh?
Well, I’ve been sorting through photos and making blog posts for a little over 24 hours hours now and the photos I’m sorting through at the moment are leading up to Port Arthur, so there’s more absolutely magnificent scenery pictures with stunning huge cliffs. Or, there are pictures from Port Arthur where it was a bit like a human zoo, there were masses of people everywhere. So that’s a nice bit of dry stone wall from Port Arthur, shrug.
